St Patrick’s Day Treats: Chocolate Guinness Cake with Irish Cream Cheese Frosting!

Happy St Patrick’s Day folks! We hope you are all having lots of fun celebrating today!

Our resident baker-extraordinaire Tess has been busy rustling up an Irish treat for us Molecules today, in the form of a Chocolate Guinness Cake, complete with Irish Cream Cheese Frosting! Delicious! We’ve all enjoyed nomming on this beauty today, as evidenced by the photo below which shows what’s left of the ginormous cake!

If you’re curious to know how to make this Irish extravaganza yourself, read on below for the full recipe, and don’t forget to let us know how you get on if you do give it a go!

Cake

• 250ml Guinness
• 250g butter, cut into sticks or cubes
• 75g Cocoa
• 400g Golden caster sugar
• 142ml Soured Cream
• 2 eggs
• 1 Tbsp Vanilla Extract
• 275 Plain flour
• 2 ½ tsps. Bicarbonate of soda
• 3 Tbsp Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur

Preheat oven to Gas 4. Grease a 9 inch diameter cake ‘tin’. (I use the term tin loosely as I often use a silicone cake mould and I’ve never had any problems)

Add the Guinness and butter to a saucepan over a medium heat. Once the butter has melted, remove from the heat and whisk in the cocoa and sugar.
In a separate bowl, whisk the Soured Cream, eggs, Vanilla and Baileys until thoroughly mixed and then whisk into the brown sugary liquid in the saucepan.
Whisk in the flour and bicarb until the batter is smooth and has an even colour. Tip your mixture into the prepared tin and bake in the centre of the oven for 45minutes – 1 hour. (mine took around 1hr 10, depends on your oven) a knife/cake tester/toothpick inserted through the centre should come out clean when it’s done.

As cakes go, this one is ‘damp’ so let it cool in the tin before tipping out upside down to a plate, and then place another plate on its bottom, and flip it right side up. Don’t even think about putting it on a cooling rack as it’ll just fall apart.

Frosting

• 400g Cream Cheese, room temperature
• 300ml double cream
• 1 tub Mascarpone cheese, at room temperature
• 230g icing sugar, sifted
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 tablespoons Baileys

Once the cake layers have cooled completely (at least two hours or overnight if you can), make the frosting by first whipping the cream until peaks form (you can use a stand mixer or hand whisk). In another bowl beat the cream cheese with the mascarpone cheese until smooth and then add the icing sugar a few spoons at a time, until it’s all incorporated (if you do it all at once it tends to turn into a runny gloopy mess and you’ll have a cloud of dust in your kitchen).
Add the vanilla extract & Baileys and beat until incorporated. Scoop the whipped cream back into the bowl and slowly fold it into the rest of the mixture with a large rubber spatula.

Carefully slice your cooled cake in half so you have two pieces to sandwich together. You will need to lift the top half very carefully, (I gently slid a thin chopping board between the slices so I could lift and keep it flat) and place it somewhere safe so it doesn’t get knocked.
Put some of the frosting onto the middle of the base and gently spread it around, leaving around 1cm at the edge, as when you put the top piece on it will smoosh down and squish it out. Gently put the top of the cake back on and frost the top.

Devour immediately!

The original recipe can be found here (which Tess found via Pinterest)! For our delicious cake, Tess used Nigella’s original cake recipe for the Chocolate Guinness Cake part, and the frosting is taken from the other recipe (minus the Whiskey!)

Good luck if you have a bash at making this beast!